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Motive for Entering the Arena of
Strife—Donald Roy of Nigg—A Remarkable Secession.
In tracing the portion of the life of Hugh
Miller at which we have now arrived, it is necessary to ask what
dominant motive .compelled this man, so enamoured of the calm
tranquility of a life of scientific investigation, to enter an arena
where he must fight every moment, and against apparently overwhelming
odds? Many have regretted that Hugh Miller became the editor of the
Witness, and that he devoted to the interests of a party powers of mind
which should have been employed in benefitting the whole race. With such
an ancestry as he possessed, with such a training as he had received,
and with the strong attachment which he had to the independence of the
people in matters pertaining to religion, he could not have avoided
taking a more or less conspicuous part in the drama, whose last act was
played out at Edinburgh, in May, 1843. We have no wish to recall the
bitterness, now fast hastening into oblivion, which was the necessary
concomitant of the struggle so long waged between the Moderates and the
Evangelicals, but, in order to account for the phenomenon of a man
singularly averse to strife and contention deliberately placing himself
in a position in which he must strive and contend daily, it is
neccessary that we have a clear conception of this fact—viz., that Hugh
Miller beleived, with his whole heart, that upon the result of the
struggle between the two great parties in the Church of Scotland
depended whether or not that venerated Establishment, which could boast
of so many men eminent for their learning, piety, and fiery eloquence,
and which had been consecrated by the blood of so many martyrs, retained
her character as a Church of Christ. Should the Evangelicals triumph,
then, in his estimation, the Church of Scotland would proceed upon her
pathway through the future, a glory in the midst of the land; but,
should the Moderates be successful, the Church would simply be a
political institution and a disgrace, rather than a glory to the nation.
His ancestry had been rigourous protesters in favour of the spiritual
independence of the Church. One of the most celebrated of these was
Donald Roy of Nigg. A wild fellow he had been in his youth, and, as .was
the custom of the time, engaged on the evening of the Sabbath-day with
the other young men of the parish in the athletic games of the country.
He was the best club player in the district, and, as a matter of course,
proud of his superiority. Every Sabbath night he indulged in his
favourite pastime, and one evening, on his return home, after
vanquishing one of the most famous of his competitors, he found the
carcase of one of his best cows lying across his threshold, where she
had dropped down a few minutes before. Next Sabbath he played as usual,
and, on coming home, he found the dead body of a second cow lying
exactly in the same place. "Can it be possible," he thought, "that the
Whigs are in the right after all." His parish had been challenged by a neighbouring
parish, and next Sunday the match was to come off. He joined the
conflict and did wonders; but, as he was returning home, congratulating
himself on his success, another cow, which he had purchased only a few
days before, pressed through a fence, and, flinging herself down before
him, expired at his feet with a deep horrible bellow. "This is God's
judgments," he said; "the Whigamores are in the right. I have
taken his day, and he takes my cattle. From that night Donald Roy was a
changed man, and, in after years, was famous all over the country for
his piety and his almost supernatural gifts.
In "Scenes und Legends of the North of
Scotland" the following incident is related of this man. Donald Roy,
after he had been for full sixty years a member of the church, was
compelled by one of those high handed acts of ecclesiastical intrusion,
which were unfortunately so common in Scotland about the middle of the
last century, to quit it for ever; and all the people of the parish
following him as their leader, they built for
themselves a meeting-house, and joined the ranks of the Secession. Such,
however, was their attachment to the National Church, that for nearly
ten years after the outrage had been perpetrated, they continued to
worship in its communion, encouraged by the occasional ministrations of
the most distinguished divine of the North of Scotland in that age, Mr.
Fraser, of Alness. The presbytery, however, refusing to tolerate the
irregularity, the people were at length lost to the Established Church,
and the dissenting congregation which they formed still exists as one of
the most numerous and respectable in that part of the kingdom. We find
it recorded by Dr. Hetherington in his admirable Church History, that
"great opposition was made by the pious parishioners to the settlement
of the obnoxious presentee, and equal reluctance manifested by the
majority of the presbytery to perpetrate the outrage commanded by the
superior courts. But the fate of Gillespie was before their eyes; and,
under a strong feeling of sorrow and regret, four of the presbytery
repaired to the church at Nigg to discharge the painful duty. The church
was empty; not a single member of the congregation was to be seen. While
in a state of perplexity what to do in such a strange condition, one man
appeared, who had in charge to tell them, 'That the blood of the people
of Nigg would be required of them if they should settle a man to the
walls of the kirk.' Having delivered solemnly this appalling message, he
departed, leaving the presbytery astonished and paralysed. And
proceeding no further at the time, they reported the case to the General
Assembly of the following year; by whom, however, the intrusion of the
obnoxious presentee was ultimately compelled. The one man who on this
occasion paralysed the presbytery and arrested the work of intrusion for
the day was the venerable patriarch of Nigg, at this time considerably
turned of eighty. He died in the month of January, 1774, in the 109th
year of his age, and the 84th of his eldership, and his death and
character were recorded in the newspapers of the time. "
The memory of such an ancestor must have
exerted a mighty influence upon the mind of a man constituted as was
that of Hugh Miller. If, in the duty of battle, the recollection of what
his fathers have done before him, and the thoughts that the spirits of
these heroic men may be looking down upon him from their unseen home,
nerves the arm and fires the heart of a soldier—the recollection that a
man is sprung from a stock which has been celebrated for moral courage,
displayed in trying circumstances, must incite in him the desire to
tread in the path which was trodden by that stock. Hugh Miller, looking
back upon that forced settlement, picturing to himself the empty church
and the perplexed presbytery, and recalling the apparition of that
stalwart old man with his startling message, which, in the
circumstances, must have sounded like one of those messages which the
prophets of old delivered to the degenerate kings of Israel—Hugh Miller,
we say, looking back to the solemn scene, could scarcely fail to be
horror-struck at the forced settlements which, in so many parts of the
kingdom, preceeded the memorable disruption. He never took a great
interest in the voluntary controversy, because he thought that on both
sides there was a large degree of exaggeration. He was at heart a
thoroughly Establishment man. He looked upon the revenues of the
Scottish Church as the patrimony of the Scottish people, and what he
wanted was not the confiscation of that patrimony, but its restoration
from the Moderates and the lairds. The Veto Act, which rendered the
patrons power a mere shadow, he hailed as the commencement of that
restoration, although he would have preferred a broad anti-patronage
agitation to that Act, a mode of proceedure which would have been safer
and more effective, because more constitutional, than the passing of the
Veto Law. He rejoiced to see the old spirit revived in modern times,
when it was thought enthusiasm could not be. rekindled with reference to
church matters; and although the anomalies connected with the position
assumed by the Non-Intrusion party in the church no doubt frequently
presented themselves in a form by no means favourable to the pretensions
of that party, this one consideration—viz., that although it might be
legally right, it must always and in all circumstances be morally wrong,
to force upon a professedly christian people a teacher in sacred things
who was in every respect unacceptable, swallowed up these anomalies as
the serpent of the prophet swallowed up the sham serpents of the
Egyptian magicians. The Court of Session, and the more august tribunal
of the House of Lords might declare that the supporters of the Moderate
policy were legally right, and that their opponents were indubitably
wrong in a legal point of view; but there was a moral as well as a legal
standard by which the questions at issue could be tested, and, when that
was appealed to, Mr. Miller could not resist the conclusion that the
Non-Intrusionists were right. We do not in this place say whether, all
things considered, Hugh Miller was correct in his conclusion. The time
has not yet arrived when a fair verdict can be pronounced upon the
struggle which culminated in 1843. History will one day trace its true
character and assign it its due degree of importance amongst the
religious and political movements of the nineteenth century. The
histories already written respecting it are special pleadings, for the
greater part—including the "Ten Years' Conflict,"—either for or against;
it is enough for our present purpose to know and feel certain that, in
relation to that movement, Hugh Miller occupied the position of an
honest man, who was certain that it was his duty to write as he best
could in favour of a cause which he deemed of vital importance, both to
the civil and religious interests of the people of this country. We have
seen the immediate cause of his appointment to the editorship of the
Witness newspaper, and the spirit in which he entered upon his labours.
He became the editor of that journal, not because the editorial task—at
all times a laborious and thankless one—was congenial to his nature, but
because he beleived it was his duty. When he saw the Church rent in
twain by the conflict in which she had engaged—when he saw her now
courted and now scorned by the politicians of the hour—and when he saw a
large mass of the people indifferent to her fate, he seriously asked the
question, "Can I do nothing for this bruised and bleeding
Establishment?" The first thing he did do was, as we have seen, the
writing of that celebrated letter to Lord Brougham; and now that
Providence had put the doing of a still, greater thing for the Church
within his reach, he could not refuse to proceed with the work. |
